AWS Change Manager is a governance and automation tool within the AWS Systems Manager designed to help organizations plan, approve, implement, and audit operational changes to their cloud infrastructure and applications. It provides a structured framework to manage changes—such as software updates, scaling events, or configuration adjustments—while minimizing risks like downtime, security vulnerabilities, or unexpected costs.
For example, a team uses AWS Changes Manager to coordinate a database upgrade, ensuring approvals from security and DevOps teams before deploying changes.
Clouds environments are inherently dynamic, but uncontrolled changes can lead to:
AWS Change Manager acts as a safety net, enforcing intentional, auditable, and risk-aware changes.
AWS Change Manager follows a four-stage workflow:
Change management begins with a user-submitted request detailing the planned modification, such as patching servers or scaling resources. The request must include the change type (update, scaling, or configuration adjustment) and precise schedule for implementation. Crucially, the user must also assess and document the potential impact, including any expected downtime and the specific resource affected. This detailed information ensures a smooth and controlled change process. A clear example of this would be a DevOps engineer requesting an update to EC2 instances using the latest AMI.
Stakeholders, including engineers, security teams, ad managers, review and approve all proposed changes, ensuring compliance with organizational policies. A multi-level approval workflow can be defined, for example, routing requests from an engineering lead to a security officer. This process includes automated compliance checks to verify that changes adhere to established standards (automated compliance checks can integrate with AWS Config or Inspector for scans). If a change fails to meet these criteria, it is flagged and may be blocked until necessary corrections are made. For instance, a security team might halt a deployment until a vulnerability scan confirms the absence of security risk.
Automated change management systems execute approved changes automatically, incorporating safety mechanisms for reliable deployments. Rollback plans are built-in, allowing for automatic reversion of changes should errors arise. Maintenance windows are utilized to schedule changes during low-traffic periods, minimizing user disruption. This automation streamlines the process and reduces the risk of human error. For instance, a fleet of RDS instances might be automatically scaled during off-peak hours.
Change tracking is essential for compliance, troubleshooting, and optimization, providing detailed audit logs showing who made changes, when, and the resulting outcomes. Comprehensive reports summarize success and failure rates, along with the impact on resources. This data facilitates efficient problem-solving; for instance, reviewing logs might reveal a misconfiguration causing latency issues. By analyzing this information, companies can improve their processes and prevent future problems. This proactive approach ensures better resource management and a more stable system.
Standardizing common changes, such as patching servers or scaling resources, streamlines operations by automating repetitive tasks like applying OS updates across EC2 instances or adjusting Auto Scaling groups based on demand. This standardization significantly reduces human error and speeds up the change process. The resulting efficiency improves overall operational reliability and reduces the risk of issues caused by manual intervention.
Change management establishes defined roles and approval rules, such as routing requests to backup approvers if primary approvers are unavailable or requiring security sign-off for high-risk changes. This customization allows for conditional approvals based on the change’s impact, for example, mandating finance team approval for cost-related changes like instance type upgrades. These processes ensure accountability and control over all modifications.
However, please take note that conditional approvals (e.g., finance team for cost-related changes) require custom setup via AWS Lambda or EventBridge.
AWS Change Manager maintains immutable records of all change activities, ensuring compliance with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, or SOC 2. These detailed records provide an auditable trail for troubleshooting, allowing for the precise tracing of failures back to their root cause. This ensures accountability and facilitates faster resolution of issues.
AWS Change Manager seamlessly integrates with numerous AWS services, including EC2, RDS, Lambda, and S3, among others. Automation is facilitated through triggers such as AWS Systems Manager Runbooks or EventBridge, streamlining the change process. This integration enhances efficiency and reduces manual intervention.
AWS Change Manager helps control cloud costs by preventing cost surprises, optimizing resource use, and reducing waste through proactive planning and automated remediation.
Here’s a deep dive into these benefits:
1. Prevent Cost Surprises: Unforeseen costs often arise from unplanned overprovisioning, such as accidentally launching expensive GPU instances. Implementing approval gates for resource creation and setting budget alerts that flag cost threshold breaches effectively mitigates this risk. For instance, requiring approval for instances larger than "m5.xlarge" helped one team avoid $5,000 in monthly expenses.
2. Optimize Resource Use: Overspending on idle or underutilized resources is a common problem. Proactive planning, including scaling down EC2 instances during off-peak hours and regularly terminating unused EBS volumes or orphaned snapshots, directly addresses this. A media company, for example, saved 30% on monthly costs by scheduling overnight scale-downs.
3. Reduce Waste: Misconfigurations, such as public S3 buckets or unencrypted databases, lead to significant waste and potential security vulnerabilities. Employing pre-change scans to identify risks before implementation and using automated fixes via Systems Manager helps prevent these issues. Correcting a misconfigured S3 bucket, for example, prevented $1,200 per month in unnecessary storage costs.
Struggling to balance agility and cost control? Octo now integrates with AWS Change Manager to automate smart, governed cloud operations—so you don’t have to choose.
With this integration, Octo not only delivers cost-saving recommendations but also ensures governance by streamlining approvals and enforcing best practices. Now, organizations can implement changes efficiently while maintaining control and compliance.
Streamline Cloud Changes and savings with AWS Change Manager + Octo? Book a demo today and let Octo turn your cloud chaos into clarity!
